A Gift for Saint Nicholas: Ashly Gear Turns Terrible Sound to Gold

Built in 1942, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Tarpon, Springs, Florida, recently retained the Tampa-based AV integrator CSi for a new sound system centered on Ashly Audio ne8800 DSP with a WR-5 NE remote control and a Bosch steerable vari-directional array.

The old sound system started with a "prosumer" analog mixer paired with an equivalent-grade processor of mid-1990s vintage. Those pieces fed ten wall-mounted, 70V 8" loudspeakers. Mounted five to a side, they were anchored at the very top of the soaring walls. Rather than face down at the congregants, the loudspeakers fired straight across the ceiling at the opposite wall, which did a fantastic job of energizing the already excitable room without delivering any direct sound to the pews. "To fix that problem, someone sold them on the idea of placing louvered air conditioning grills over each of the loudspeakers," said Paul Garner, principal of CSI. "The idea was that they would reflect the sound down to the pews. It was a total joke. To make matters even worse, none of those loudspeakers, which spanned the length of the room -- 80' front to back -- were time aligned. The first time I visited St. Nicholas, I stood at the back of the room while Father Michael spoke at the pulpit, I could not understand a single word he said. Literally, not a single word."

Not only were the room's acoustics challenging, but its status on the National Register of Historic Places took the possibility of any structural changes off the table. "No one, myself included, wanted to see the speakers in that beautiful room or to alter the room to hide them," said Garner. "We needed something discrete but effective." His solution was a Bosch digitally steerable line array, each line of which he camouflaged against the molding surrounding the pulpit. Their precise coverage pattern focuses direct energy on the pews and minimizes direct energy on the walls.

"When I asked Father Michael if they had a sound person, he paused and then responded, 'Every person is our sound person,'" said Garner. "Without guessing that it was possible, he went on to say that what he really wanted was a sound system that could take care of itself." Garner provided a concrete response to his rhetorical request: Ashly's Protea networkable ne8800 digital processor features a gain sharing automatic microphone mixer with automated feedback elimination for this turnkey "church-in-a-box" sound system.

Garner placed the Ashly ne8800 DSP processor using all eight microphone-level inputs in the equipment rack at St. Nicholas Church. To combat the room's favorite resonant frequency, which sits somewhere around 450Hz and is capable of creating wicked sub-harmonic modes, he high-passed every signal to the minimum frequency required to capture intelligibility (for spoken word) or musicality (for the choir or cantors). To minimize any annoying high end, he rolled off everything above 10kHz. "The ne8800 does a fantastic job of providing auto-leveling, auto-mixing, and auto-feedback suppression," Garner said. "With the full power of Ashly's processing, I was able to dial in every aspect of the sound reinforcement with any tool I could imagine. It's all there." When the church completes its Internet infrastructure, Garner will assign an IP address to the Ashly ne8800, which is network enabled out of the box. It will allow him to make changes from anywhere, including his Valrico, Florida office, saving a three-hour round trip to St. Nicholas Church.

"After the first service with the new system, a parishioner approached Father Michael," recalled Garner. "In broken English colored by a Greek accent, he said that he had been coming to St. Nicholas for thirty years and this was the first day he was able to understand the Father's words!" That's the sort of improvement that matters deeply.